Forward Deployed Software Engineer - Platforms Engineering

At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary products, services, and customer experiences. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish. That same passion for innovation that goes into our products also applies to our practices, strengthening our dedication to leave the world better than we found it!

Most software engineering roles hand off testing to one team and operations to another. Here you own all of it. As a Software Engineer on Forge, you'll design, build, test, ship, and run the platform Apple's engineering teams build on, working closely with those teams to find where the infrastructure beneath them gets in the way and fixing it.

Forge is part of Enterprise Technology Services (ETS), within Apple's Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization, the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. Forge is building the platform Apple's engineering organizations can use to take a service from code to running in production. That path has traditionally run through a series of separate specialist systems. We are bringing it together on a common platform with a shared core, so a team goes from allocated capacity to a live production service without assembling the pieces themselves. Our job is to get teams to production quickly, on a platform that stays secure and reliable without them having to think about it.

Our charter is deliberately wide and still growing, reaching from the physical fleet in the data center to the surfaces engineering teams build against, and extending into new environments and new classes of infrastructure as Apple's needs evolve. We are a small team with outsized reach, bringing an AI-first mindset to how the platform operates and improves itself, and the best work we do takes one team's hardest problem and turns it into a capability every team inherits.

Description

As a Forward Deployed Software Engineer, you will embed with the engineering teams who use our platforms, then build the software that solves their problems. This is a software engineering-first role that goes well beyond feature development: you will sit with a customer team to understand their applications and workflows, translate ambiguous requirements into a technical design, write the production code, integrate it with existing systems, and stay with it through deployment and operational readiness. We run what we build, so you will also share an on-call rotation for the services the team owns - which is the fastest way to learn where the platform still falls short.

The work spans Go backend services, React and TypeScript applications, REST and gRPC APIs, distributed systems, and automation that reaches into public cloud, private cloud, Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments. You will also build AI-assisted capabilities - LLM integrations, and agentic workflows - along with the evaluations and quality controls that make those capabilities measurable and trustworthy enough to run in production.

You will move comfortably from a technical discussion with an engineering customer to designing a solution, writing the code, and validating that it works reliably at scale. You will approach loosely defined problems with curiosity and sound judgement, and you will know when a recurring customer request should become a reusable platform capability rather than another one-off integration. You care about clean, maintainable code, thoughtful architecture, and operational reliability, and you are as motivated by simplifying an existing system as by building a new one.

In a team with daring goals and real autonomy, you will take utmost ownership of what you ship - and measure your success by the engineering problems you solve and the lasting improvements you leave behind in the platforms other teams build on.

Minimum Qualifications

8+ years of professional software engineering experience designing and delivering production software

Strong backend development skills in Go, or in a comparable language such as Rust, C++, or Python with the ability to become productive in Go

Solid understanding of software architecture, REST and gRPC APIs, distributed applications, and relational data modelling

Hands-on experience with relational and distributed SQL databases such as PostgreSQL, Oracle, Aurora, or CockroachDB, including schema design, migrations, query performance, and connection management

Strong networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, subnetting, routing, TLS, and DNS record types, together with practical load balancing experience across L4 and L7, health checks, session affinity, and DNS-based global traffic management such as Route 53 or an equivalent

Experience with a major cloud provider such as AWS, GCP or AliCloud, across compute, storage, networking, load balancing, and identity and access management

Working knowledge of Linux, including systemd, processes, filesystems, permissions, and command-line troubleshooting

Understanding of service-to-service authentication and transport security, including mTLS, PKI and certificate lifecycle, OIDC, and RBAC

Familiarity with software delivery practices including source control, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and production deployments

Experience operating services in production, including observability with metrics, logs and traces, incident response, and root-cause analysis

Demonstrated technical leadership on multi-team projects - driving alignment, influencing partner teams, and raising the engineering bar around you

Ability to work from loosely defined requirements, evaluate implementation options, and choose a practical path forward

Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work directly with engineering customers

Preferred Qualifications

BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience

Experience building modern front-end applications with React and TypeScript, including component-based UI development and API integration

Experience building internal platforms, infrastructure automation, developer tooling, or enterprise software integrations

Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containers, and deployment tools such as Helm, Kustomize, Terraform, or Ansible

Experience building or operating distributed systems, including control planes, job orchestration, work queues, or state reconciliation

Depth in multi-region data consistency - locality-aware schema design, follower reads, or partitioning in CockroachDB, Spanner, or equivalent

Experience across hybrid and multi-region infrastructure, including private cloud, virtual machines, and bare-metal systems

Experience with observability technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or Splunk

Experience with network virtualization, software-defined networking, or data center network architecture

Experience with progressive delivery practices such as canary releases, blue/green deployments, and automated rollback

Hands-on experience integrating LLM APIs - prompt development, tool and function calling, multi-step workflows - and developing AI evaluations, agentic workflows, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations

Demonstrated ability to turn customer-specific requirements into reusable software and platform capabilities

Experience mentoring engineers, leading design reviews, or setting technical direction for a team

Exposure to infrastructure or fleet management at scale